Economic and Social Development - Fourth un development decade

In 1990, the General Assembly concluded that its goals for the Third UN
Development Decade had not been attained. It set new priorities and
goals for the growth of the developing member nations with its
International Development Strategy (IDS) for the Fourth United Nations
Development Decade (1991–2000). Within one year of its passage,
however, the former USSR had dissolved, forever changing the landscape
of international economic relations. Many of the assumptions on which
the IDS had been based were upset by the historic forces that were thus
set in motion.

In September 1990, the Second United Nations Conference on the Least
Developed Countries set targets for official development assistance
(ODA) to those nations. The General Assembly, through the new IDS, urged
industrialized countries to reach or surpass those targets. It also
recommended that developing countries try to raise their rate of
industrialization by 8–10% and increase their annual food
production by 4%.

The General Assembly set forth six goals for the new IDS that amounted
to an early manifestation of a new philosophy of
"sustainable" development that would be vigorously
developed at the historic UN Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED), two years later. The goals of the IDS were:

To speed up the pace of economic growth in the developing countries;

To devise a development process that meets social needs, reduces
extreme poverty significantly, develops and uses people's
capacity and skills, and is environmentally sound and sustainable;

To improve the international systems of money, finance, and trade;

To strengthen and stabilize the world economy and establish sound
macroeconomic management practices, nationally and internationally;

To strengthen international cooperation for development;

To make a special effort to deal with the particular problems of the
least developed countries.

The philosophy for the new IDS was based on the principle that, because
the developed countries have the greatest influence on the international
economic environment, they have a special responsibility for the success
of development efforts. It also recognized that speeding up development
would require strenuous efforts by developing countries to increase
domestic savings, raise investment and investment returns, hold down
inflation, exercise monetary and fiscal discipline, maintain realistic
exchange rates, and allocate resources more efficiently.

Improving the state of international trade was paramount for any
development plan. The Uruguay Round of the GATT talks were stalled and
protectionism was on the rise in the developed nations. The strategy
proposed that the following actions be taken to accelerate international
trade in the 1990s:

Stand by the commitment made in 1986 to halt and reverse
protectionism;

Liberalize trade and improve developing countries' access to
all markets by reducing or removing tariff barriers;

Free up trade in tropical products and products based on natural
resources;

Make sure that GATT contracting parties adhere strictly to the
agreement's rules and principles.

Other provisions of the IDS included establishing more stable commodity
markets, obtaining concessional terms for the transfer of technology to
developing countries, and finding agreement on a way that the
intellectual property system (which protects ownership of copyrights,
trademarks, industrial designs, and patents) can promote development
while protecting intellectual property. It also recommended that work on
international rules and standards to govern the exchange of
technological information (the code of conduct on the transfer of
technology), which had come to a halt at the end of the 1980s, should be
completed.

The underlying causes of economic stagnation also were decried. The IDS
called for the eradication of poverty, hunger, adult illiteracy, lack of
basic education for women, and runaway population growth in developing
countries, and noted the catastrophic deterioration of the environment
by shortsighted development projects.

In 1992, the Secretary-General gave the General Assembly a guardedly
optimistic report on the progress of the IDS to that point. The
developed market economies themselves had grown by only about 1% in
1991. Although a recovery had begun in 1992, it was considered to be
weak. There was concern that the urgent needs of the newly independent
countries of the former USSR, often referred to as "economies in
transition," would divert assistance from developing countries.
Per capita incomes remained stagnant or declined in all the developing
regions, except South and East Asia and China. The debt crisis of the
developing countries had not worsened, but little progress had been made
in terms of debt relief and forgiveness. However, some of the Latin
American countries had again become creditworthy.

The
1993 Report on the World Social Situation
, commissioned by the General Assembly to review the implementation of
the Declaration on Social Progress and Development made 20 years
earlier, also was cautiously optimistic. It noted the positive direction
of reform in the United Nations system towards coordination between
various UN agencies with operations in the same countries.
"Although the major development goals, proclaimed more than 20
years ago in the Declaration on Social Progress and Development, have
not changed significantly, the priorities, approaches and emphases have
been reviewed and renewed, as the understanding of the forces behind
development have deepened. Thus, emphasis is now on assisting the
recipient countries to strengthen their institutional capacity to
sustain the development process" the report said. In other words:
helping them learn how to help themselves.

In October 1999, as the Second Committee began consideration of
sustainable development and economic cooperation in the year 2000, it
reviewed a report evaluating the implementation of the commitments and
policies agreed on in the IDS. The report concluded that though there
were improvements in the 1990s, economic growth had not accelerated in
all developing countries. The Uruguay Round had led to progress being
made with the betterment of the global trading system, but the
international financial system had not been stabilized. Nor had there
been a marked improvement in international development cooperation. The
world's least developed countries had seen
"negligible" economic and social advancement during the
decade. For future purposes, the report went on to differentiate between
growth, which may carry with it negative social consequences, and
development, which means more than simply increased purchasing power (as
reflected in gross domestic product per capita). According to the
report, development also pertains to education, health, and
environmental standards, as well as to social (including gender) equity.
For this reason, "the spotlight is now shifting from a focus on
macroeconomic challenges to a number of institutional preconditions,
including good governance, transparency and accountability,
decentralization and participation and social security," said the
UN report. Acceptable and viable development strategies in the new
millennium would have to take into account the prevailing circumstances
in developing countries, which could not be expected to keep pace with
industrialized, developed societies in the North.

The economic and social initiatives of the 1990s had highlighted that
neither growth nor development necessarily eliminates poverty, which was
one of the key objectives of IDS. The UN concluded that sustainable
development, of both urban and rural human settlements, was directly
linked to the alleviation of poverty, which became the focus of economic
and social development at the dawn of the 2000s. At the October 1999
meeting of the Second Committee, the Group of 77 developing countries
and China presented draft resolutions for the first United Nations
Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (which technically began in 1997
and extended through 2006). On 9 December 1999 the General Assembly
voted to implement the Decade and called on all nations to formulate and
implement "outcome-oriented national strategies and
programs" and set time-bound targets for poverty reduction. The
Assembly further called on developed countries to strengthen their
efforts to achieve the agreed target of 0.7% of their gross national
product for overall official development assistance, and within that
target to "earmark 0.15% to0.20% of their gross national product
for the least developed countries." Acknowledging the information
age, the Assembly resolution highlighted the importance of strengthening
the cooperation between developed and developing nations in order to
"promote capacity-building and facilitate access to and transfer
of technologies and corresponding knowledge."

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